The Man With No Name

Dating Update

I don’t remember how I left the last update, but it does seem to move forward in fits and starts. And as I get further along the “dating path” (and it does feel like a path, an actual vector with direction), I’m finding that the dating situations tend to get more enjoyable and interesting.

For a while I felt like the only thing I was learning was ways in which it hurt to slam your head into a wall. “Okay, now try THIS angle of impact. Yep, that hurts too. All right, now try THIS one…” And I wasn’t really learning any ways to make it better. But things are more amusing these days.

Honestly, I think that what happens for women is that they get on match.com, and they feel their stock go up. They get pounded with attention, more than they would in real life. And it changes their standards. (And then they can’t understand why these seemingly cute guys they meet online are such freaks when they meet in person.) And I think the inverse happens for guys. I’m embarrassed to admit that a couple of times I’ve felt things like, “YOU’RE not giving me the time of day? YOU???” But you can’t help it, not when the law of large numbers is there. You find yourself not looking in terms of mutual compatibility and if two people are looking for the same things, but instead in terms of relative attractiveness. Who’s in your league, who’s out of your league. And as for me… the women I’ve been involved with in the past (never through dating services) have always been pretty attractive – more so than most of the people that will communicate with me on match.

Now, that’s not to say that my standards are all that unrealistic. I don’t even like the magazine model type. My biggest celebrity crush is on Pam from The Office.

Anyway, I had had a long string of underwhelming match.com dates and I was starting to take it personally. It wasn’t fun. And some of it was being rejected by people that I had completely relaxed my standards for. (See the mental trap there? By relaxing my standards, I was trying to force myself to be compatible with people that just weren’t compatible, but then since they recognized that when I was invested in not recognizing it, it’d mess with my head in terms of wondering if my “standards” were STILL too high… major self-esteem mindbender.) But then…

A friend of mine starting making suggestive noises that a friend of hers might be interested in me… and this woman was very attractive. Like that kind of universal attractive that pretty much any guy would think was really attractive. Which isn’t really even my kind of attractive, but you know. It’s like the universal donor blood type. Easy to adapt to. And because this tied into my whole stupid “what’s in my league??” self-esteem benchmark struggles, I of course tied that in to feeling better about myself.

And it actually seemed to have some momentum for a while – I never got rejected, we started to hit it off, but there was some overlap between her and another guy that was developing, and that kind of went that way even while I still got a bit of confidence out of it.

The one thing that was tough about it was that since it started out being through a friend of mine, there wasn’t a lot of direct communication, and it was way too easy for me to overthink and overinterpret things. So I ended up kind of exhausted about that. Still a net positive, but I was not feeling good about overthinking someone.

But then someone else overthought me, in a way I found kind of endearing and wanted to help with even though it wasn’t entirely appropriate for me to help… but I weirdly came out of that feeling like things were a bit more karmically balanced. Like, at least I’m not the only person that overthinks things. And she knew I was completely capable of overthinking things too, so hopefully she didn’t feel stupid about it either.

So, I don’t exactly know why, but I feel generally refreshed about the dating thing. What’s in progress lately? Well, something else that I might be overthinking, but I’m trying to learn my lesson from the last time and just let it breathe. And someone else that seems highly interested in me (“as a friend!”) even though she just started dating someone, which is kinda weird, but she’s hilarious so I’ll ignore that little red flag for now.